The House passed a stopgap spending bill on Tuesday to keep the government open for four additional weeks, diminishing the chances of a paralyzing government-wide shutdown before Thanksgiving but also punting a tough decision on border wall spending.
The lower chamber approved the short-term spending fix in a 231-192. The Senate is expected to clear the measure before federal funding dries up on Thursday night. President Donald Trump is expected to sign off on the bill, which runs through Dec. 20, since it doesn’t impose new restrictions on border wall spending.
While Congress has nearly averted yet another debilitating lapse in federal funding, congressional leaders still lack a fiscal 2020 funding plan beyond the new deadline. Protracted fights over Trump’s border wall dominate spending talks and impeachment proceedings threaten to consume Congress through January.
“Failing to secure funding for the federal government before the end of the year is not an option,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor before the House vote. “These talks must continue because it’s vital that we work in good faith to fund important priorities for the coming year. But what is needed in the near term is to keep the government open for the next several weeks while this work goes on.”
The bill passed largely along party lines, with Republicans like Reps. Kay Granger and Mac Thornberry of Texas opposing the measure over concerns about continually flat-funding the military through a series of stopgap bills.
House Democrats lost the votes of the four progressive members known as “The Squad.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said on Monday that she wouldn’t support the bill because of surveillance extensions that were tacked on. Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts also joined her in voting no.
Congressional leaders have set an ambitious goal of passing a dozen, full-year appropriations bills before Dec. 31. And top appropriators had hoped to secure a deal on spending levels for those measures last weekend.
But the topline numbers are still embroiled in partisan fighting, despite a massive bipartisan budget deal earlier this summer that boosted defense and domestic spending limits by about $100 billion for the next two years.
Appropriators warn that extra cash secured by the budget agreement will essentially get tossed if Congress reverts to a full-year stopgap — a looming possibility if lawmakers fail to pass even the most bipartisan spending bills in the next few months.
The slow pace is a far cry from last year, when lawmakers were able to pass bills that funded about three-quarters of the government, including the military and the bulk of domestic programs.
“We haven’t been able to replicate that this year,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said on Monday. “I wish we could. We haven’t quit yet. We can’t quit.”
During a meeting Thursday among House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and congressional appropriators, negotiators agreed to set the border wall stalemate aside for the moment and move forward with other spending bills.
But Shelby said the wall remains a huge impediment, and neither side shows any indication of backing down.
Senate Republicans want to give Trump $5 billion to build a barrier at the Southern border in their fiscal 2020 Homeland Security spending measure. The House bill would provide zero.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the House Labor-HHS-Education spending panel, said in a recent interview that Senate Republicans “need to get off the dime. [The wall] is where the holdup is.”
The stopgap that Congress is expected to send Trump this week would maintain the status quo on border wall funding and other immigration issues.
It would also fund a 3.1 percent military pay raise, provide extra cash to help the Commerce Department gear up for the 2020 census and allow state highway programs to avoid a $7.6 billion cut this summer. The measure includes a number of health extenders and renews three expiring surveillance provisions through March.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has previously threatened to filibuster surveillance legislation, also signaled that he won’t protest the short-term extension.
In last-minute negotiations over add-ons to the CR, House Democrats failed to obtain funding for historically black colleges and universities that lapsed in September.
“It is profoundly disappointing and deeply shameful that the Senate GOP has yet again turned their back on America’s young people and these historic institutions,” Pelosi said in a statement on Monday.
Just before the vote on the stopgap, House Democrats changed their legislative vehicle for the measure from the Senate‘s shell for several full-year appropriations bills to that for a commemorative coin bill. The switch followed protests from the Senate leaders, who want to preserve their vehicle for spending legislation in the event of substantial progress.
But Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) objected to the change, forcing House Democrats to revert back to their original bill number.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/19/house-moves-to-avert-shutdown-but-border-wall-fight-lingers-071575
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The Article Was Written/Published By: cemma@politico.com (Caitlin Emma)
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